In reality people never have equal power over anything (what would that look like, physically?) so something like nash bargaining is an attempt to get closer to a notion of fair given this inequality

I don't think the difficulty of equal power is a good excuse to pretend power doesn't exist.

One way we solve it in the real world is that the negotiators also have power - including, possibly, the power to force the party most OK with the status quo to come to the negotiating table, and reject exploitative proposals.

That isn't foolproof either, of course. But it beats rhetoric trying to convince the weaker party to submit.

I didn’t say it doesn’t exist, rather that it’s already taken into account. I’m also not sure what you are proposing- if mediation is required, and someone has more power than someone else, why would they voluntarily engage with a mediator who will reduce that power? Or if they are forced to use this mediator (eg by the state) then this means they never had the power in the first place

This is so cool. Even small disputes like roommate arrangements can feel very emotionally impactful at the time and it would be wonderful to have a tool for these moments

Thank you!

This is lovely. Thank you for sharing this

It is “simple” Find out what people want Make it Sell it to them Unfortunately, engineer brain loves to skip step 1

Ive recently become friends with a younger person who makes a lot of money off vibe coded mini saas. He is fanatical about step 1. If he can’t find n people begging him to make it he will go validate the next idea. He’s ruthless with this aspect and will drop an idea instantly if people dont care. It really woke me up to the reality of it all. Made me realise how much i delude myself into making things people dont want because i enjoy the making process. I will at best half ass step 1 and the proceed to spend a few months hand crafting some software no one wants. Meanwhile he spends two months validating and one month vibe coding something that people would be embarrassed to post on HN and then sell 100usd/month subscriptions to it. Its crazy

I just don’t understand how does it work. Like where do you find such people? How do you make them beg you? Isn’t building in a saturated market kind of proves that there is demand?

the begging thing is a bit of a myth imo. what it actually looks like is you describe the problem out loud to someone and they go , god yes that's exactly it - before you've even mentioned a solution. that reaction is the signal. you're not manufacturing demand you're just finding where it already exists. the hardest part is you need to talk to a lot of people before you find that reaction, that was the biggest pitfall i fell into during my first startup. trying hard not to make the same mistake twice, youve to be really mindful

Begging is hyperbole, its as you describe. Just looking for the strong reaction

If you cant find the people, may not be the right market for you :) ideally you are exposed to target market directly, and daily. Or you team up with a cofounder who is. Re: building in saturated market - “prove” is a strong word. It’s another signal. And you can judge for yourself how strong :) i dont think anything can replace direct customer feedback

> kind of proves that there is demand?

It proves that there's demand but you might not get a piece of the cake. That's being able to sell/speak to the people in your market is so important

This is exactly the trap. I keep catching myself spending weeks on the tech stack and architecture before I've talked to a single person.. the building feels productive and quite comfortable, it's like a quick reward to us for having an idea without needing to battle test in the field

Proxy over GitHub’s REST API for fine-grained repo access – e.g. file-level scopes. For unpredictable agents :)

The big difference is that in many cases the people who support this are the same ones that are addicted. You’re telling addicts to stop their moral panic over their own addiction

I don’t know a single person who after exposure to short form video has not had to exert special effort to regulate their consumption.

Is this a young people thing? I'm 40. I have never liked Shorts. What am I supposed to get out of 10 seconds of video? And all the sudden jump-cuts, and big obnoxious one-word-at-a-time subtitles... They're all literally unwatchable.

I watched my 78yo step mother become addicted to reels so older people are definitely not immune. But she was able to go cold turkey as she only communicated with her sister over instagram so it wasn’t a problem to just continue with WhatsApp. Young people real life networks are too enmeshed with instagram to have the same option.

Also, what you’re describing sounds like when you’ve haven’t spent enough time on the shorts for the content recommendation algorithm to learn your preferences. Which I agree, is unwatchable. I saw it recently when my friend put on YouTube shorts on a guest account (on an Airbnb smart tv). it was bad. But spend enough time and that will change. But best you don’t!

Same here. In fact, I uninstalled the YouTube app because there was no way to disable Shorts within it while I can use browser extensions to do so in Safari. (I pay for Premium.)

Then again, I hardly use YouTube, so I don’t think I’m the target audience for this.

Please, I beg you, stop and think about these things.

"is it a young people thing": no, obviously not because nothing is.

You're just as prone to addictive behaviours at 20 as at 40 at 80.

There might be some differences as to how you happen to be exposed, perhaps because of how your literal social network is behaving, but that's obviously not intrinsic.

I mean, yes, perhaps "young people" are slightly more likely to be exposed to it via advertising/peers/etc, but anyone with a similar exposure can be a victim.

I find casinos unpleasant but plenty of people obviously don't. I also find games with a narrow FoV unpleasant; I was never able to enjoy DotA 2 because of this and League was only just barely tolerable. Similarly I detest modern web design and gravitate towards sites with an HN or spreadsheet style information dense layout.

I think that's all related, is at least partially a matter of what I'm accustomed to, but is largely just an inherent part of how I am.

Really? I watch a lot of long-form YouTube while doing the dishes, and occasionally poke at the Shorts. Some funny, mostly dumb and I move on.

Maybe a generational thing, but for most of the latter half of the 20th Century most folks had to “exert special effort to regulate their consumption” of network television. Should there have been lawsuits and regulation of couch potatoes?

Using behavioral psychology in commercial speech should be illegal?

Good luck with that one. Somebody probably used 18th Century behavioral psychology to try to sell George Washington a horse!

You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.

Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.

OK, sorry, so using behavioral psychology to encourage an audience to stay on the couch watching TV for prolonged periods should be illegal?

This is the Netflix business model, right now.

The difference is that the media is 30 seconds not 2 hours so the feedback loop is shorter and the content pool is far far far deeper because it is user submitted so the content recommendation algorithms become so effective , and the experience so compelling, that it becomes addictive. And as a wise man once said “a difference in scale is a difference in kind”

I’m actually strongly sympathetic to this argument, but I’d love to see some actual clinical research that suggests algorithmic short form video has mental and physiological effects that (say) video games do not.

Netflix makes the same profit whether you watch 30 minutes or 30 hours a month.

Tiktok gets paid for every extra second you spend there.

Netflix certainly doesn’t think about their subscriber audience that way.

Screens on their own aren’t “uniquely and magically addictive”, but infinitely scrollable short form video delivered through that screen is, because a few companies spent billions on the smartest minds in the world to make it so.

So you would support banning any form of entertainment that people spend more time on than TikTok since it would be above the threshold of addiction?

More or less, yeah. There might be some nuance about the threshold for maladaptive behaviour, but if it’s all or nothing I’ll take all.

How would you get around the First Amendment difficulties?

There are plenty of public interest limitations on free speech. Food labels, cigarette warnings, deceptive ad laws. Regulating addictive social media isn't really an outlier here.

Even commercial speech regulations need a stronger basis than, “People spend a lot of time listening to it.”

The parent comment set up a false choice and then had to adapt to the response calling their bluff.

The issue isn’t with reading or consuming content, as was set up in the challenge above.

The issue is with designing feeds and surfacing content in ways that take advantage of our brains.

As an analogy, loot boxes in video games, and slot machines come to mind. Both are designed to leverage behavioral psychology, and this design choice directly results in compulsive behavior amongst users.

I live in New Zealand, so I don't have to.

I didn’t mention time? From Cambridge dictionary: ‘addiction: an inability to stop doing or using something, especially something harmful.’ I am in support of regulating things which are harmful and which people have trouble not doing

Like potato chips?

If a specially designed endless bag of such were aggressively marketed and chemicals to induce appetite added to them then sure.

It's a matter of degree.

I don't impulsively drive to the store to purchase another bag immediately after finishing the one I have whereas (for example) many people exhibit such behavior when it comes to tobacco.

In the case of social media the feed is intentionally designed to be difficult to walk away from and it is endless (or close enough as makes no practical difference). Even if it weren't endless, refreshing an ever changing page is trivial in comparison to driving to the store and spending money.

How would you contrast social media with Netflix in this regard?

An amusing question. Episodes are much longer and most shows only have one or a few seasons. I don't get the sense that streaming services optimize for difficulty to walk away and do something else any more or less than a good book does.

Maybe autoplay and immediately popping up a grid of recommendations should both be legally forbidden as tactics that blatantly prey on a well established psychological vulnerability. I'd likely support such legislation provided that it could be structured in such a way as to avoid scope creep and thus erosion of personal liberties.

In short I think Netflix is closer to a bag of Lays and modern social media closer to the cigarette industry of yore.

It’s definitely to encourage Claude code usage. Owning the interface through which your core product is delivered is a hedge against the commoditisation that everyone talks about. Eg, it’s much harder to switch from Claude code to cursor or vice versa than it is to switch between models in cursor (I sometimes don’t even notice model defaulting to composer inside cursor)

This is clearest reason for us to accustom ourselves to using open weight models on open source harnesses. Whatever advantages the frontier closed models offer, this will turn into ash in the mouth, when the enshittification cycle begins. And don't be mistaken, it will begin. There is no precedent which can claim otherwise.

I am sure the models themselves are being RLHF tuned to work very well with the proprietary agent harnesses. This is all turning into a huge trap right in front of our eyes and the target is not just programmers but also companies whose core product involves software production.

Fully agree with you

I can believe it - maybe they feel they have enough of a lead in usage with programmers with Opus that they want to locking down the tooling side as well.

edit: clarify

I quit my last job because of this. I’m pretty sure manager was using free chatgpt with no regard for context length too, because not only was it verbose it was also close to gibberish. Being asked to review urgently and estimate deadlines got old real fast